EtherZero – The Cancelled Ethereum fork

You may have heard the name EtherZero during the past few months if you are involved in the crypto community. People were excited to see what it would bring for Ethereum and what new features it would introduce. Sadly, it seems that we will never find out. It has been announced that the EtherZero fork will no longer be happening. A new currency will be launched in its place, one which will have all the features that people wanted from EtherZero.

What was EtherZero?

EtherZero was a planned hard fork of Ethereum. For those unaware, a hard fork means that the new currency created will not have a link to the previous one. It basically means a new update is branching out. EtherZero was created with some of the problems Ethereum faced, in mind. It was meant to make Ethereum better.

One of the biggest such updates which it would include was instant transactions. Cryptocurrencies are valid currencies only if they can be used in transactions. If you cannot use a currency to buy something, it becomes useless .The problem was that transaction time was so high with Ehtereum that it was not affordable to use it for transactions. So while people who kept Ethers were happy that they were getting richer due to the increase in its value, Ethereum was not fulfilling its true purpose. This resulted in developers lamenting the high transaction times and costs.

It was also designed to be even more scalable than Ethereum, and it promised to allow Dapps to be used in mainstream society. All these were very noble goals, but the fork has been canceled.

Why it didn’t work out

One big reason that people didn’t go through with the fork is that no major Ethereum players seemed to be involved with it. Forks in cryptocurrencies are a purely democratic system. Once a new fork is created, you have the choice to join it or stay. If you stay nothing changes for you, but you risk being left behind. If you update, you cannot go back to the old chain, and you risk the new fork not being worth it. There have been many controversial forks in cryptocurrency history, some of them resulting in the currency created by the fork being worthless.

This is why people are very wary of forks. They only want to go through with it if they are comfortable with it. Bitcoin had a planned fork which was being supported by some of the biggest names in cryptocurrency, yet people weren’t happy with it so it didn’t go through. EtherZero’s creators realized that their idea didn’t have enough legs, and releasing it would result in nothing but people losing their money. They have thus opted to cancel the fork and go through with their idea separately.

People were worried that EtherZero was a fork and they would run away with people’s money. The cancellation proves that the folks behind EtherZero had good intentions – if they wanted to run away with other people’s money, they would never have canceled the fork.